THE END OF THE WORLD IS A CUL DE SAC

How much agency does a person have, especially in moments of turmoil, is the question at the heart of Kennedy’s first volume of short stories, set in a contemporary Ireland divided by wealth and education.

Characters here are defined as straining to get by or complacently secure. In “Hunter-Gatherers,” a bookish woman new to rural life is aggravated both by her gamekeeper husband’s inept attempts at  “self-sufficiency” and his rich, obnoxious hunting clients; in “What the Birds Heard,” a professional in data science runs away from her husband to a gentrified cottage on the coast and into the temporary arms of a local workman who disdains her as “posh.” Feeling trapped, these and many of Kennedy’s women exhibit passive resentment toward the men in their lives. Others face their own complicity in the messes the men create. In the title story, an abandoned wife deals with the financial disaster her husband created but also her guilt at having turned a blind eye when she could have made a difference, while the mistrustful pregnant farm wife in “Imbolc” wishes she’d never suggested her husband grow pot to cover their debts. Kennedy sometimes challenges typical assumptions. In “Belladonna,” a working-class girl misreads—as does the reader—the inner workings of her neighbors’ marriage. Similarly, in “Gibraltar,” empathy shifts unexpectedly from the dissatisfied wife toward her coarse, self-made husband, who remains devoted to his unloving wife and to the daughter he knows is not biologically his. Portraits of men in emotional turmoil—particularly the forester in “Wolf Point,” who accepts that his young English wife is an unfit mother—are particularly moving in a book mostly focused on women, as are fleeting moments of union between men and women surrounding their children. “Garland Sunday,” about a damaged marriage, ends the book on an oddly hopeful note celebrating forgiveness and resilience.

Irish in its lyricism and landscape, universal in its portrayal of the vagaries of the heart.